Theory of Emotions

No, our taxonomy is based on long-standing research that has established that there are six basic emotions that are universally expressed and recognised by humans. These are happiness, surprise, anger, sadness, disgust, and fear. This has been widely accepted as the de facto standard in psychology for years.

Our platform measures happiness, surprise, sadness, disgust, and fear, but we also measure confusion instead of anger. Confusion is not one of the six basic emotions, but having analysed thousands of ads, we realised that anger was almost never elicited. Instead, we were seeing a similar expression - the same movements of the eyes and the eyebrows as anger, but different movements around the mouth - confusion. People rarely get angry at ads, but they do often get confused, so confusion replaced anger on our roster.

Additionally, we measure a series of proprietary metrics derived from those emotions and our own research, which can be used in conjunction with the basic emotions to gain deeper insights into the videos we test. These are:

Engagement: a measure of whether participants have any expressive reaction to a stimulus.

Valence (Net Positivity): a measure of whether a reaction is more positive or negative. This measure helps to elucidate the emotional “tenor” of the viewing experience by deducting Negative from Positive.

Negative (Net Negativity): a measure of whether participants are showing an emotion classified as negative.

People everywhere experience and display the same set of basic emotions described by Dr. Paul Ekman. In the studies we have conducted so far, we've been able to track these six ‘basic’ emotions in all countries.

However, there are cultural differences in when and how often the basic emotions occur. For that reason, we take into account possible cultural differences in how people respond to video by providing country level norms.

Both men and women experience and display the same basic emotions. There are some differences in base rates between men and women. Just as we take into account possible cultural differences, similarly we take into account possible differences between men and women in our research.

Yes, how much emotion is evoked does depend on the stimuli. Dynamic TV ads can evoke more emotion than still images for instance. However, still images can also induce a significant emotional response if the messaging is strong – and negative, or even an indifferent response is useful knowledge regardless.